VividSimon Simply Perfect

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

morrison-dylan-fan With a poll being held on IMDb's Classic Film board for the best titles of 1990,I decided to take a look at Woody Allen's IMDb page.Discovering that Allen had made a film which appears to have become almost forgotten about,I decided that it would be a good time to find out if Alice did live here anymore.The plot:Taking her kids to school, socialite Alice Tate runs into a handsome man dropping his kid off at the school.With having been married to Doug for 16 years,Alice's life has become one that is focused on material possessions,partly related to the spark in her marriage having burnt out long ago.Talking to her friends about feeling attracted to someone other than Doug,Alice's friends advise her to a herbalist doctor called Yang.Meeting Yang,Alice starts to tell Yang about the sudden feeling that are developing.After getting Alice to reveal her inner feeling via hypnosis,Yang gives Alice a packet of herbs,which he claims will make her act on her impulsive feelings.Taking all the herbs,Alice soon enters a new & exciting wonderland.View on the film:Staying behind the camera,writer/director Woody Allen and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma use superbly-handled tracking shots to show all of the material possessions being at a distance from the "real" Alice.Sliding the movie into wonderful flights of fantasy,Allen dips into Alice's mind by startling infer red flashbacks,and a visit from a Ghost of Christmas Past-style character.Despite filming not being the easiest experience, (with Allen checking himself into hospital,shortly after finishing the films multiple re-shoots) the screenplay by Allen expertly cracks the shell of Alice's high-end,shallow life,thanks to Allen showing the riches to have drained any excitement from Alice's life.Enchanting Alice (and the audience) with the appearance of Dr.Yang,Allen reveals a real joy in taking advantage of the fantasy opportunity,as Allen uses Yang's herbs to take Alice from being invisible,to flying across a vast city.Made just before he passed away, Keye Luke gives a splendid performance as Yang,with Luke giving Yang a real sense of excitement,over helping Alice to peel away to her true self.Whilst her performance does contain some hints of being twee,Mia Farrow does very well at keeping Alice largely on the charming side,with Farrow giving Alice an excellent nervous energy,as Alice starts to turn away from her closed-in life,and begins to look into the looking glass.

movie reviews Alice (Mia Farrow) is a guileless rich New York housewife who shops looks beautiful for her husband Doug (William Hurt) and takes care of her kids from time to time.She encounter Joe Mantenga at her children's school and is smitten...through the help of a Chinese acupuncturist herbalist hypnotist she embarks on a magical odyssey and discovers what her real values are.It is a unique and creative movie where by Alice appears invisible is able to fly with ghosts and other things much like Alice in Wonderland.There are a couple funny lines but this is not a comedy...it treats with a light touch matters such as fidelity in a far more palatable manner (in my opinion) than the contemporary dreadfully serious (and lousy) film by Allen entitled: Another Woman.Prepare to be entertained and left also with feelings a drama might leave as well... perfect.About the only reservations I have is Allen's constant dated use of upper middle class pseudo intellectual (for want of a better phrase) New Yorkers...you get the opinion he takes them as important social markers for his own prestige. But then one must remember that Allen was born in 1935 he is essentially of another generation one where divorce fidelity and upper middle class props were boiler plate and serious frameworks.

Gavin567 ALICE is a mediocre film that could have been a good film. This is because Woody Allen likes to dabble in themes such as self-discovery and the angst of relationships with others and with the self, but he frames everything in schtick, so that everything that happens is basically the setup for jokes. This works well when he sticks to comedy and satirizes wealthy Upper West Side New Yorkers, but you can't have a film about self-discovery when everything that is about to become serious deteriorates into schtick. Male directors have a long history of fetishizing actresses and trying to squeeze their female secrets out of them, and Allen is no exception. But Allen goes one further, and makes his actresses like ventriloquist dummies who adopt his own neurotic self-deprecating style. So rather than trying to get into an actress's soul, as Rosselini or Bergman did, he inserts his own soul into them and has them be him. It's a sort of vampirism. Psychologists have noted that compassion lies in the ability not to understand how YOU would feel in another person's situation, but to understand how THEY feel, as THEMSLVES, as a person who is NOT you. Allen lacks compassion in that sense, and that is a strange handicap for a writer who is attempting scripts that deal with issues of identity. His vampirism causes him to create a world where his own values predominate: that is, where everyone has the hots for everyone else, and where the activity du jour is for people to jump in bed with one another. Mia Farrow's character Alice is originally drawn into this world, but in the end rejects it for higher spiritual needs (going to Calcutta, working with Mother Theresa, giving up her wealth and selfish lifestyle and servants, and doing her own cooking and cleaning). Female socialites gossip at the end of the film about her remarkable transformation, and include in the same breath the transformation of another friend who has had plastic surgery. While Allen seems to be making fun of these gossipy women, he is also shares their view of Alice: that her transformation is as shallow as having a facelift. He always takes a tone of petulant jealousy in his films when women reject him in favor of something else. He seems to feel most abandoned not when they are leaving him not another man, but when they are leaving him for a place where they can hide away from him in their own soul - to "find themselves." His most famous films - Annie Hall, Manhattan, and others - all deal with this theme of being rejected by a woman when she goes into herself. He makes fun of women when they do this. They are seen as flaky, self-involved, being attracted to new-agey forms of self-discovery that are beneath him. For me what is really deflating about his movies is his jealousy of the spiritual center of women, and his attempt to trivialize and belittle them for having deeper souls than him. It's as if he doesn't want anyone to feel anything beautiful if he can't. For Allen, women are disappointing because they have to go on these spiritual journeys and won't just go with romance (which for him means that everyone gets to bed everyone all the time). Even where there are opportunities for something really interesting to happen - such as when characters are given a magic potion that allows them to be invisible for a time - the only way they take advantage of this is to watch other people having sex, voyeuristically gaze at models undressing, or listen to people engaging in gossip about love affairs. So nothing ever rises above the level of a sex comedy.Most viewers will miss the references in the mostly 1930s soundtrack. Over the opening credits "Limehouse Blues" plays, a song from the '20s about the ghetto in Chinatown: "In Limehouse, where Orientals love to play, In Limehouse, where you can hear those blues all day…" This song is the setup for Alice's visit to the weird Chinese herbalist/ hypnotist doctor, and plays whenever Alice visits his exotic den in Chinatown. It's a type of racist humor that may have played well in the '50s, but not so well today. "I Remember You" plays when her dead husband pays her a visit, another gag. And "Alice Blue Gown" plays during Alice's moments of self-discovery and over the ending credits, and may even be the inspiration for the title and character name. This song is from around 1919, and is about a girl singing wistfully about a "beautiful Alice blue gown" that she used to have. Here are some of the lyrics: "In my sweet little Alice blue gown, When I first wandered down into town, I was so proud inside, As I felt every eye, And in every shop window I primped, passing by." This indeed is the way Allen looks at his Alice character: as a sweet girl proud to wear a lovely gown, primping and trying to catch men's eyes. He plays this song when Alice is going on her spiritual journey, which would seem inappropriate. It's as if he is saying that she is not a grown woman with children and her own inner life, but only a lovely young girl in a gown, a girl who exists only to be loved and admired but who is stupid enough to reject love for her own silly pursuits.In the end Allen makes fun of Alice's purity and refusal to wallow in bereft values like the others with the song, and by framing her selfless actions as a form of fanaticism. This is actually how sociopaths feel: jealous of people with real feelings and real love. Allen appears to have a voracious appetite for youth and innocence, which he merely tries to corrupt.

MisterWhiplash While Brian De Palma was in his part of the Park Avenue section of Manhattan making the curious disaster that was Bonfire of the Vanities, Woody Allen was in his section making something of a lighter story, satirical but less barbed and not quite as outrageous. It's about an upper-class housewife who has pretty much anything she could want, and is pampered: high-rise apartment, high-paid massages and clothes and jewelry and whatever, but she also has a boring husband and a back that is aching. So she's sent to a sort of mystical Chinese doctor who gives her a hypnotizing trick, and starts to give her herbs. This spurs on a different way of thinking, or, at least, an affair with a musician, and she also revisits painful memories of her past: a broken relationship with her older sister, and a her former lover who died when she was younger.The film addresses an interest that can be found in many of Allen's films, something one wouldn't expect from a filmmaker usually associated with therapist couches and satire on neurotics and intellectual New Yorkers, which is magic. One saw it in Purple Rose of Cairo, and one sees it here manifested in a fable structure. Alice (a charming and sometimes affecting Mia Farrow) has to change by her own accord, but is assisted by these 'herbs' that make her invisible, see her dead lover (Alec Baldwin in a great supporting role) in the same room with her, fly high in the sky, and speak with her sister at their old family home in her mind (whether that part is from the opium, if it even is opium, is hard to say), and a potion that will make any men fall desperately in love with her, which makes for the climax of the picture.Meanwhile, she tries to find herself, her creative spirit as a writer (if it's even there) and a possible lover in musician Joe Mantagna plays. There's some whimsy that Allen is dealing with here, and some intentionally obvious cinematic tricks (a spotlight on Baldwin, the choice in the music like out of a 40's escapist movie, the use of red tint when Alice is being hypnotized), but there's also a smart-serious undercurrent for Alice as a character. What will she do with herself? Will she stay with her husband in a complacent existence, or go with Joe, who may have his heart elsewhere? The resolution to this all is the kind of ending that wouldn't usually come in a fairy tale (I suspect it may have been inspired by Farrow herself, and her dedication to helping out third-world poverty-stricken children). But the film is satisfying as something light and fluffy, some satire of the rich and their petty concerns thrown in, and some existential 'Woody' angst thrown in for good measure.It's not a major work by any means, and I think Allen is content with it that way. It's also a fine showcase for Farrow (what films in the 80's weren't, i.e. Broadway Danny Rose) and her skills as a comedienne and as a serious actor, in equal measure.